Warning on sales and discounted items

baddiebasher

You may or may not be aware of the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008. These regulations have changed a fair deal of pre-existing conusmer protection legislation.

One main aspect is to do with sales and other discounted prices.

Previously, the legislation was very prescriptive and required certain timeframes and conditions for a sale to be called a sale.

This has now changed - for the worse (imho).

Now the definition of a sale is whether an item was sold at the higher price for a reasonable length of time. And therein lies the problem.

What is reasonable? Well, there is no guidance - at least nothing with legal standing. It's for a court to decide, and it is based on the individual circumstances. This means, unfortunately, that enforcement auhorities such a trading standards will not risk prosecuting because for fear of losing (a substantial amountof money they can ill afford). And because there are no or few court cases, there is no case law upon which may provide guidance.

The upshot is this:

You cannot guarantee that an item on sale is a fair reduction in the way it used to be.

Many Trading Standards are advising consumers to ignore price reductions and just to look at the price that the item is on sale for - not how much it has supposedly been reduced by.

Hope that helps people. Advertising can be a powerful thing. I would urge anyone to ignore promises of how much an item has been reduced by, and just take it that the price something is on sale for has always been on sale at that price.

uganda

No, I wasn't aware of this (as you can see by something I posted recently - http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?p=15834689#post15834689) so thank you for bringing it to our attention.